I must warn you that this is a long post that may be boring to some and too spiritual to others .. it is not very well written and sometimes it doesn’t make much sense, even to the writer, with lots of BSs here and there and jumbled thoughts…but if you insist then I am very flattered and you may continue reading:
This weekend I watched Julia’s latest movie Eat, Pray, Love ( don’t judge ;)).. The movie was based on a book by author Elizabeth Gilbert that apparently gained the attention of many women all over the world!
The story in short is about a woman who decides to get out of an 8 year marriage and struggles to get her life together so she decides to embark on a one year journey to Italy (the food part), India (the pray part) and Bali (the love part)..
I am not going to talk about the movie since people have different opinions and preferences .. so go and make your own opinion about it .. After the movie I told my friend that few months back I started planning a trip for next year and I was seriously considering taking time of work and taking a long journey around the world (well Asia to be less exaggerative) and I planned it very well but then things changed.. to the better Inshallah..and I invested part of that money saved for the benefit of my own work .. however, after watching the movie and just for the first few minutes (I say minutes because it sounds better in writing but in reality its more like until I woke up the next morning) I doubted whether I had made the wrong decision!? … My friend told me “why do you want to take a journey of self discovery when you already found your self and are doing what you’ve always wanted?” and this my friend(s) is why I am writing this post..
Besides everything we love to do in life such as succeeding in the right career and the many other things we love that make us different from each others.. Spirituality and love is ultimately what we all (and ‘we’ here is mainly ‘I’ and those sharing the same feeling… it’s not an ego thing 🙂 ) seek out of life.. yes we want many of the other things too and we work hard to get them and it makes us happy to have them and we should be happy if we succeeded in getting them.. but without our spiritual existence then we will always be incomplete .. maybe to everyone the definition of spirituality is different..it’s not necessarily religion based.. but for me being a Muslim there are many practices required that we do without hesitation and follow them on a daily basis .. but how many of us are really spiritual and how many of us have this deep bond with God?
To me (I am leaving the ‘we’ here for a while) spirituality is not about the practices and prayers we do in life.. it’s about surrendering to God, believing in the ups and downs of life because I have faith in God knowing that my shortcomings are not because I missed a prayer or made mistakes but more because for a moment I may have lost faith in God’s forgiveness .. when I feel things are out of my control and I start panicking and questioning life, it’s only due to the weakness in believing in God’s presence in my daily life..when we are truly spiritual we know that no matter what life may surprise us with .. we will always spring out of it with something ‘Good’ .. Only when we are truly spiritual we can accept the guilt and shame we feel and forgive ourselves on our daily mistakes and find peace and happiness in the life we have..
But why do we travel to places so far away and so different from our religious culture and way of life and our comfort to find ourselves? why can’t we find it here?
I don’t have the answer but from my experience in order to dig deep within myself I need to remove myself from the surrounding I am questioning in the first place, from the daily routine and expectations ..from people who are constantly judging your life .. traveling the distance means stripping away everything that I don’t want along the way .. being in that place that everything and everyone doesn’t matter anymore .. a place where I can have sex, get drunk, take drugs, practice other religions and pretty much do whatever I want to do because no one is around to judge me and no one matters anyway!
I think that I am ‘Free’ .. but then I realize that I don’t want to do this or that .. and I realize then that it’s not what I’ve been looking for .. whatever feeling that may come I know that those are feelings coming from within me… this is what ‘I’ believe in and not what others want me to believe in ..I finally can find my spiritual self .. It might be a very ironic way to help us find our spirituality..
Maybe it’s true that after this long journey we eventually come back to what we always had.. to our religion. our family .. our friends .. our work and way of life ..but only when we take this journey we can come back with a different understanding and appreciation of it all ..
So my friend maybe I did find what I enjoy to do in life … and I don’t doubt or regret my decision .. But what I wanted to find was my spiritual self ..keep doing what I am doing after finding my balance in life… and maybe that’s why for a very short period of time I doubted my choices!